ONE OF the persistent questions about Laura Bush has always been whether she is more liberal than her husband.
In her new memoir, Spoken from the Heart, the former first lady refers to this line of inquiry as "an odd sort of Washington parlor game" that wearies her. So those answers will not be found in this book, which is scheduled to be released on May 4th.
Bush recounts the moment when Katie Couric asked her if she believed the law permitting abortion should be overturned, and she expands her answer from then only slightly: “We are a nation of different generations and beliefs, seeing issues through different eras and different eyes.
“While cherishing life, I have always believed that abortion is a private decision, and there, no one can walk in anyone else’s shoes,” she writes.
On gay marriage, she writes that before the beginning of the 2004 presidential campaign, “I had talked to George about not making gay marriage a significant issue. We have, I reminded him, a number of close friends who are gay or whose children are gay. But at that moment I could never have imagined what path this issue would take and where it would lead.”
It led, of course, to a divisiveness which persists in American politics still.
In her memoir, Bush does not dwell on that. Instead, she writes with dismay of senator John Kerry, answering a presidential debate question about the subject by mentioning that the daughter of vice-president Dick Cheney is a lesbian.
“Beside me, Jenna and Barbara gasped. They were utterly stunned that a candidate would use an opponent’s child in a debate.”
She is none too happy with senate majority leader Harry Reid and House speaker Nancy Pelosi for the mean things they said about her husband. She calls out the House leader for calling her husband “dangerous” and the Senate majority leader for calling him “a loser” and “a liar”.
Nevertheless, the Bushes continued to invite both to the White House for events and “when the queen of England visited in the spring of 2007, Pelosi danced in the White House in her long ball gown”.
There is some startling stuff in here. The memoir, which was written with Lyric Winik, who is married to historian Jay Winik, passes the first-sentence test beautifully: “What I remember is the glass.” It is the glass of a hospital nursery window, and little Laura Welch is 2½ years old and her newborn brother is lying on the other side. He would live but a few days, spoken of as “a late miscarriage”, even though he was one with a birth certificate.
In this first chapter, Bush lays out the isolation of pain not spoken. “In those times, in west Texas in the 1950s, we did not talk about those things.” And there are some pointed choices and some unflinching honesty.
Her guilt for flying through a stop sign at the wheel of her father’s car and killing one of her close high school friends persists, she writes of the car crash when she was 17.
“And the guilt isn’t simply from Mike dying . . . There are the hard, inner circles wrapping around Mike’s parents and Mike’s sister, whose lives were changed and ruined.” There is guilt for having never paid a call to the parents. She “lost her faith that November, lost it for many, many years”, she writes, and she doesn’t refer to getting it back.
Her account of the tense and dramatic days after the 2000 election reveals nothing of the interior legal manoeuvring of both sides or even what she knew.
She has empathetic words for Hillary Rodham Clinton, of whom her mother-in-law, Barbara Bush, once tartly described as "a word that rhymes with witch". Their kinship was immediate, Bush writes, when they met in late December 1999. – ( Washington Post-Bloomberg)